Untitled Book Review

THE Atlantic turns with gratitude to Miss Anne Carroll Moore, of the New York Public Library, for her annual recommendation of the best new books for children.

WITH Julia Newberry’s Diary in one hand and Maurice O’Sullivan’sTwenty Years A-Growing in the other, one sets forth to explore children’s books of the year. By every inherent right do these two books, so utterly different in form and substance, belong to girls and boys in the teens. The one holds the spicy comment and lovable personality of a spirited young American girl of the 1870’s, the other the companionship of a vigorous Irish youth of the twentieth century who writes with wit and refreshing clarity of t he natural beauty and of the people he knew in childhood.

A genuine life story is so rare among children’s books that Cornelia Meigs’sInvincible Louisa (Little, Brown, $2.50) must be given first place. Here is a biography which Louisa Aleott herself might read with a grateful heart. Firmly rooted in family tradition and carefully documented, it is interpenetrated with a true understanding of the eternal struggle of the born writer who must carry her family along with her at all costs. Very moving arc the pictures Miss Meigs gives of Bronson Alcott’s successive migrations and experiments in daily living. Their cumulative effect, the impact of life itself upon his gifted daughter, she wisely does not attempt to measure. It is indeed the distinction of Cornelia Meigs’s biography that it reveals the quality of a rich personality subject to continual growth and change rather than that of a static figure belonging to another era. The spirit of Louisa Alcott was far in advance of her time, and no one knew better than she did the difference between ‘moral pap’ and the living word.

It is the tonic quality of Elizabeth MacKinstry‘s vigorous drawings for a new edition of Andersen’s Fairy Tales (Coward-McCann, $2.50) which leads me to this spacious red book. The fun, the sheer absurdity to be found in Andersen, are too often missed. ‘His feel for a fool was almost Shakespearean,’ says Miss MacKinstry, and proceeds to make an unforgettable drawing of the third dog(‘with eyes as big as towers’)of ’The Tinder-Box.’ There is a notable double spread in brilliant colors of the marvelous hall clock that came marching into church in the story called ‘The Most Extraordinary Thing’ —a timely story which has the true feel of the good workman in the days of the great craftsmen. This story was first published in this country by Horace E. Scudder, then editor of the Riverside Magazine, in which magazine for children a dozen or more of Andersen’s tales were published before their appearance in Denmark or England. Miss MaeKinstry’s book is one to enliven the reading of Andersen for many a boy or girl who has found fine print or overfanciful pictures a barrier.

Since The Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll (Macmillan, $2.50) contains also the collected illustrations of his own and other artists for the poems and rhymes, it will interest many boys and girls to contrast the work of Sir John Tenniel and Harry Furniss with that of our own A. B. Frost, whose lively ghosts appear in the illustrations for ‘Phantasmagoria.’ The book contains a number of unpublished juvenile pieces, as well as all the verse which appeared in the books published by Lewis Carroll in his lifetime. For personal pleasure, and for ready reference when in pursuit of ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ or another poem to read aloud, the collection, with its chronological arrangement, is a reminder that a sense of nonsense is born young and lives forever.

No change in the field of children’s books is more marked than the freer, more natural treatment of life in foreign countries and in our own. The Handsome Donkey, by Mary Gould Davis (Harcourt, Brace, $1.75), with its spirited, informed drawings by Emma Brock, gives an authentic impression of the daily life of Italian mountain folk in a form most acceptable to children. Story and pictures alike seem to have been created in a mellow holiday mood in the very heart of the Apennines. It is an amusing story, in which Baldasarre proves his bravery by rescuing his master and wins the lasting friendship of the American dachshund who has first scoffed at him for his vanity. The strong pictorial quality of the Italian background is given full value in the typography of the text and in the clear colors used in drawings which have been admirably reproduced.

My Boys, translated from the Swedish of Gustav af Geijerstam by Alfhild Iiuebseh and illustrated by Karl Larsson (Viking, $2.00), is a notable book of Swedish life. Two boys, aged seven and nine, full of the mischief common to small boys all over the world, are the inspiration of the book, whose author was a wellknown writer of Swedish books for adults. The father and mother who appear in the book are very understanding people in their relations with children, and parents who read it aloud to their boys, as Mrs. Iiuebseh did, may profit by the experience. The many lithographs play an important part in creating the atmosphere of the Swedish seaside village in which I he boys are spending a summer. Mrs. Iiuebseh has made a delightful translation for American children.

Any grown-up lover of the one-ring circus of Paris will be as charmed with Powder (Smith & Haas, $2.00) as was the five-year-old child to whom I gave my review copy. The lithographic drawings in brilliant colors by Fedor Rejankoosky tell the story of the little white colt who escaped from becoming the saddle horse of the fat Duchess by running away to the circus. The story is also told in words by Esther Averill and Lila Stanley, who first published the book in Paris. The perennial joy of the circus in any land is in this charming book, with its unique double cover design.